I love the Gimp. I find many features are easier to learn than Photoshop. It goes both ways though... some stuff is much nicer in Photoshop. I miss a few features though - Gimp doesn't do 16 bits per color channel (yet), and it doesn't do clipping paths in JPEG files (which arent part of the JPEG standards). If it could do both of these it would meet all my professional needs.